Moral science has two halves. There are the implications of thinking straight about fact and value (ideal theory) and there are the implications of not thinking straight. Ideal theory is the foundation, error theory the daily battle.

Saturday, September 24, 2005

44 dead people, 44 translucent blocks on the flight path

If the Crescent of Embrace is not a memorial to the terrorists who downed Flight 93, why does it contain 44 translucent blocks, instead of just the forty inscribed to memorialize the forty murdered Americans?

Take a look at this graphic of the Crescent’s Memorial Wall:

Passengers and flight crew are memorialized with the translucent blocks on the left.

The lower portion of the wall, on the left, contains forty translucent blocks, backlit at night, and inscribed with the names of the forty murdered Americans. There is also an an upper section of wall, continuing up the flight path that Flight 93 followed as it came into the crash site. Notice that this section of wall also contains a strip of translucent blocks, a shorter strip, just long enough to memorialize a small handful of people, like maybe the four terrorists who also died in the crash.

Confirmation comes from noting that the center point of the upper section of the memorial wall lies exactly (to the pixel) on the line that bisects the red maple crescent. I had earlier placed my detailed analysis of this bisector further down in this post but I decided to move it up, to establish at the outset that this upper wall is indeed a separate sub-memorial to the terrorists.

The red crescent bisector

Identifying the tips of the red crescent is pretty straightforward, and ultimately unambiguous. At the bottom crescent tip, there is no possible ambiguity. There is a last red maple tree, sitting directly on the circle that the crescent partly inscribes. The top also offers an obvious choice. A pair of walls mark off an area filled with red trees. If you print out a screen-shot of the PDF, you can see by tinkering with a compass that the inner of these walls lies on circle of the crescent. The crescent tip has to be located on this circle or a perpendicular projecting through the midpoint between the crescent tips will not pass through the center of the circle and the crescent will not be symmetrically bisected. Thus the upper crescent tip logically becomes the tip of the inner wall.

Voice of Reason, who was the first to try to define the red crescent tips precisely, used a slightly different method for defining the tips. He used the furthest out red pixels on both top and bottom. This method can’t be quite right, however, because the red trees between the two walls on top are above the circle of the crescent. Thus Voice’s mid-point perpendicular does not quite bisect the crescent.

With ambiguity removed from the red crescent definition, the red crescent bisector proves to precisely bisect the upper portion of the memorial wall. Below are a full view and a detail, followed by the pixel measurements. The upper portion of the memorial wall begins where you can see a path winding in from the upper left. That path passes through the gap in the wall.

Red crescent bisector.

Detail view. Upper wall starts where path coming in from upper left passes through gap in wall.)

Anyone who wants to can replicate and verify my graphic by taking a screenshot of the PDF of the crescent site plan and pasting it into a paint program. (To take a screenshot of an active Windows window, hold down Alt and press Print Screen.) Plain Jane Microsoft Paint has a line tool that activates a pixel counter on the lower right of the screen. I just connected the dots in blue (330 pixels east-west, 446 pixels north-south); followed with a half line in red (165 e-w by 223 n-s); and a perpendicular from the center of the circle (just below the center of the 3) out towards the upper wall (446 e-w, 330 n-s). Cuts the upper wall dead center. Using the line tool in Paint, I measure 5 horizontal pixels by 13 vertical pixels from the intersection of the line and the wall to each end of the wall.

The fourth translucent block

Looking closely at the upper wall, a possible contra-indication to the terrorist-memorial hypothesis emerges. The plan only has a band of three translucent blocks in the upper wall, not four.

Close up of gap between lower and upper memorial walls. Forty translucent blocks on left. Only three on right.

The cover story for the blocks is that the blocks on the upper wall are to inscribe the date, 9/11/2001. Once the upper wall has been determined to be integral with the red crescent, the placement of the date on the upper wall takes on a sinister meaning. The terrorists don’t get to have their names inscribed, but they do get to own the date, which of course was their objective.

Even without knowing that the upper wall is precisely centered on the crescent, the date inscription would not be enough cover to get away with four translucent blocks. People looking at the forty blocks from below would look up and say: “Hey, who are those blocks up there memorializing?" If they go up and see four blocks, the date is not going to fool them into thinking that they are just being paranoid. Several people a day at least would say: “Wait a minute…, forty blocks there, four blocks here, forty murdered, four murderers…” Thus the thesis of hidden Islamic intent requires that the schemer come up with a bit more cover, some way of hiding the fourth block.

Not that hiding a fourth block would be hard, especially in a section of wall that tapers into the ground, as the upper part of the memorial wall does. Just stick the fourth block below ground near the upper end, where the level of the translucent blocks disappears below earth. But why hide underground when you can hide in plain sight?

There is one more translucent block in the Crescent memorial. If you continue up the line of the memorial wall (the flight path that Flight 93 followed on its way to ground) you come to the upper tip of the crescent, where an overlook at the entry portal terminates in a huge glass block, inscribed with the mission statement of the memorial.

Overlook extending through inner circle of crescent, with large glass block at end, dedicating the site.

Is this where an Islamist schemer has symbolically memorialized the fourth terrorist soul? In the glass block that dedicates the entire site? Gotta be. Forty-four dead, forty-four translucent blocks on the flight path to death. Remember, the translucent blocks are numbered. The number is intentionally significant.

Repeated inexactitudes, ultimately resolved exactly

The memorial turns out to have been designed through a process of not quite exact Islamist symbolisms, presumably to throw off the suspicious, each one of which contains its own deeper Jihadist meaning. The locally missing fourth translucent block is just one example. Another is the orientation of the he red crescent, whose bisector turns out to be 1.7 degrees off of the exact direction to Mecca. The hidden meaning? One can also bisect the circle of the crescent by the true Mecca line and then look to see what crescent tips it defines. When this is done, the upper crescent tip turns out to be the large glass block implicated by the terrorist wall. Other inexactitudes do the same thing. They point to deeper perfidies that ultimately resolve the inexactitude exactly, to the pixel. It is actually an ingenious design. It could no more be coincidence than a perfectly working bicycle could spontaneously form out of primordial ooze.

To pull back the layers of deception and intent, I’ll start with the in-exactness that first prompted me to look closer.

The slightly off center Islamic star

I was originally prompted to look closer at the memorial wall because I was looking to see if I could find an explanation for the slight difference between the geometry of the Crescent of Embrace and the geometry of an Islamic flag. Charles Johnson and others had noted the overt similarity. There is a copse of trees in the Crescent plan that sits on what looks to be the center line of the crescent, just where the Islamic star sits on an Islamic flag.

Crescent and copse.

Crescents and Stars.

When a number of bloggers were verifying the Crescent’s orientation towards Mecca last week, my two cents was to look closely at the positioning of the copse to see if it is indeed positioned exactly as the star on an Islamic flag. I found that the centerline of the crescent does indeed project through the copse, as does the slightly different line that projects from Mecca through the center of the circle that the crescent partly inscribes. Yet neither of these lines project through the center of the copse. Instead, they pass through the upper third of the copse.

The copse is small compared to the huge crescent, so the deviation from a perfectly centered star is only slight. Thus the copse-star connection provides further evidence of intended Islamic symbolism, but it also leaves a question mark. If the copse is supposed to represent the Islamic star, why isn't it precisely centered on the Mecca line?

Looking through the graphics at the Park Foundation website, I came across the graphics of the copse area. (On the website, click on the furthest left set of Crescent plans to see the Copse.) The explanation was immediate. The upper half of the copse shelters the upper portion of the memorial wall. When the crescent and the Mecca line point to the upper part of the copse, they are pointing towards what seems to be a sub-memorial to the terrorists, and this is confirmed by the placement of the upper wall precisely in the center of the red crescent. Though perhaps we should say that it is the memorial to the murdered Americans that is the sub-memorial, since it is literally off to the side. The orientation of the larger crescent structure on the upper portion of the memorial wall makes the upper wall the central memorial.

The Islamist site planner still had some generosity though. The murdered Americans get to have some trees too. Thus the Islamic star at the center of the crescent gets a little lopsided. After all, this is America, and the Americans might not stand for it if the memorial were ONLY for the terrorists. But of course there are limits to Jihadist generosity. The terrorist memorial has to be separate. Jihadists regard infidels as “najis” (as unclean). They can’t touch us. Thus there has to be a gap between the memorial to the murdered Americans and the memorial to their murderers.

What? You thought the Crescent of Embrace was supposed to heal the divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims? The Crescent is facing precisely away from Mecca. It represents the OUTWARD embrace of Islam. The outward embrace of Islam is jihad. This is a memorial to Jihad. At least, that is the thesis here, that some Islamist snuck in a memorial to the Jihadists, and there is still more evidence, or should I say proof, to come.

Deviation from Mecca

The crescent bisector determined by the red maple trees is not quite the true Mecca line. If you use Google Earth, you can find the blasted out semi-circle of trees where Flight 93 crashed at 40 degrees, 3 minutes, 1.5 seconds north, by 78 degrees, 54 minutes, 16.57 seconds west. These numbers can then be plugged into an online qibla finder. (Muslims call the direction towards Mecca from any particular point its qibla direction. Hat tip SarahW .) Using the qibla finder at dnzh.com, the Mecca line comes out to be 55 degrees 10 minutes and 92 seconds clockwise from north (about 55.18 degrees).

Voice of Reason came up with an almost identical 55.2 using an online great circle calculator (subtract his 124.8 from 180). He also cued me in to the idea of using pixel counts to determine the angles of lines in graphics. The angle of my red-crescent bisector can be determined by taking the arctangent of the ratio of the n-s pixel count and the e-w pixel count.

If you have forgotten your trigonometry:

The tangent function of the angle A is defined as a/b. To find the value of A, apply the inverse tangent function (arctangent) to tangent (A). A = arctangent (tangent(A)) = arctangent (a/b). (Graphic stolen from some kind soul at ClarkU. Hopefully this is fair use.)

In the present example, A represents degrees counterclockwise from east of the red-crescent bisector. Rise over run (a/b) for this line is 330/446, or .7399. Arctangent(.7399) = 36.498. To convert this into degrees clockwise from north, subtract it from 90. 90 - 36.498 = 53.5.

This is a little further off the exact Mecca line (55.18 degrees) than Voice of Reason calculated in his post. It is 1.7 degrees off Mecca, while Voice's result is less than one degree off. The difference comes because Voice, as noted earlier, Voice tried to locate the upper crescent tip using the furthest out pixels of red, which are above the circle of the crescent, introducing some error into his bisector.

You can also see the 1.7 degree deviation of the red-tree crescent from Mecca pretty clearly on Etaoin Shrdlu’s original graphic, built around a true Mecca line. Etaoin somehow managed to get hold of a polar map of the earth with the Shanksville crash site as the pole. He plotted the Mecca line coming in from the northeast, and inset the Crescent’s site plan to the southwest, with the Mecca line projecting through the crescent’s center point. If you look closely at the result you can see that his perpendicular doesn’t quite touch the crescent tips as defined by the how far out the red trees extend. There is a visible gap between Etaoin’s perpendicular and the last red tree at bottom.

Etaoin Shrdlu's brilliant superposition of Mecca line and site plan.

So the Crescent ISN’T oriented EXACTLY on Mecca. Don’t be put off of your suspicions. Every inexactitude in this design, when investigated, reveals deeper perfidies. The slightly uncentered star reveals the upper memorial wall. The missing block in the upper wall reveals the connection to the forty-fourth translucent block on the flight path, the dedicatory block near the upper crescent tip. So too with the slightly off Mecca orientation of the red-crescent. Whoever designed this kept intentionally making it off by just enough so that those who were suspicious enough to look closely couldn’t accuse him of creating an exact Islamic representation, but in the end he couldn’t resist tying it all up exactly.

The exact Mecca orientation

The second orientation to examine is how the crescent tips would have to be defined in order to orient the resulting crescent precisely on Mecca. The bottom crescent tip is unambiguous. It's at the top where the complexity of the double walls and the flight path portal create a spray of features, some one of which, used as a crescent tip, might yield a bisector pointing directly at Mecca. Aghast at the thought, I tried the portal where the flight path that carried our heroes to their doom crosses the inner crescent wall. Nope. Not quite right. The bisector is just a touch too flat, so I just calculated how many pixels I would need to move the top point by to get an exact Mecca line, connected the dot at the bottom, went up and over the required number of pixels, touched down the resulting spot on the upper inner circle, and said to myself: you sick bastard.

It goes right through the glass block at the end of the overlook that projects into the crescent along the flight path. IT'S THE GLASS BLOCK.

Overlook entending through inner circle of crescent, with large glass block at end, dedicating the site.

This is THE Mecca line. Zero deviation, within the precision that the site plan, and the limited number of pixels on my view screen, enable. Here is my graphic, calculated to the pixel. I made the lines finer than in the other graphic so that the lines do not obscure the end of the overlook, where the glass block sits.

Precise Mecca line bisector, passes through glass block at end of overlook on flight path at top.

The line between the crescent tips is 326 pixels e-w and 468 pixels n-s. That yields a bisector line 55.14 degrees from north. That’s .04 degrees steeper than the true Mecca line, but even a one pixel correction would over-correct, and I want to do my pixels in multiples of two anyway, so I can locate the midpoint precisely. Notice that the Mecca line also passes through the 115 foot upper section of the memorial wall about twenty feet from the end, right about where the level line of the translucent blocks descends into the earth. Oh yeah. They were going to plant a fourth translucent block there, right under the Mecca line, giving an even more perverse meaning to the big glass block up on the crescent tip: that’s their Islamic heaven, the big translucent place where all individual translucents go. It is where each Jihadist martyr lives in ecstasy with his 72 houris.

So which is worse, determining the crescent’s orientation by how far around the red trees extend on either side and having the crescent orient precisely on the center of the upper section of memorial wall (turning it into a completely obvious and integral terrorist memorial wall), or determining the upper crescent tip by the Mecca line and having it go through the glass block that dedicates the site? Worst is the obvious reality: that some stinking Islamist designed the Crescent memorial to do both of these things. MURDOCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

INTERJECTION-UPDATE: I have just discovered that the crescent array up at the Tower of Voices section of the memorial manifests the same two orientations as the crescent part of the memorial: 1.7 degrees off Mecca, and precisely on the Mecca line. My post here. END INTERJECTIION-UPDATE

Closer to heaven

With the key discovered, all the parts fit. The terrorist part of the wall is closer to the glass block at the crescent tip, i.e. closer to the symbolic Islamic heaven. The copse also manifests this orientation. Notice that it is triangle shaped.

Triangle shape of copse.

At the tip is a small copse, a precise copse, directly on the true Mecca line, then there is a larger copse centered on the terrorist portion of the memorial wall, then there are more trees, further from heaven and outside of any true Islamic star, that could be taken represent the dhimmis (those unbelievers who accept submission to Islam). Dhimmis are accepted, but not included. Then there is Dar al Harb, the world of war, referring to all those infidels who do not submit. These are not included in the copse part of the memorial at all. They are back in the graveyard of the crash site, where they belong.

Yes, one can always find symbolism, but the key to this design has already been unlocked. Interpretation can take the precise Mecca orientation and the other intended Islamist structures here as a given. When other details, like the exact copse design, make sense in terms of this established structure, they are likely also intended.

Murdoch’s deceit indicates no coincidence

The possibility of coincidence is vanishingly small at this point. Symbolism is what architects do. They understand the Islamic symbolism of the crescent. They know that adding a star in almost exactly the position of the star on an Islamic flag confirms the Islamic symbolism of the crescent. They understand that orientation towards Mecca is yet another Islamic symbol. They understand that if a separate wall is added, distinct from the wall of American dead, and it is centered on the crescent, that wall gains the Islamic symbolism of the crescent and the star. They understand that, when there is a translucent block for each dead American, additional translucent blocks symbolize additional deaths, and they know who else died. Is it possible to achieve all of this Islamic orientation without knowing it?

If a monkey sits at a typewriter FOREVER it might type a verse of Shakespeare, but if I see an English Ph.D. student put on a monkey suit and straight off type, “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore are thou Romeo,” I’m pretty sure it’s not a monkey. It’s not impossible. These architects in monkey suits could really be monkeys, but I’m not buying it.

For one thing, Murdoch has already been deceitful. It is inconceivable that the inclusion of an Islamic star in the memorial was not intentional. It only takes a cursory examination to see that the crescent and copse is a kissing cousin to the Islamic flag. No professional purveyor of symbolism could possibly be unaware of it. Adding a star to the crescent is like adding Jesus to the cross. It’s pretty hard to say it isn’t an Islamic crescent when it is paired with an Islamic star, yet Murdoch had the memorial project’s superintendent, Joanne Hanley, convinced that no Islamic symbolism was intended.

"The name is irrelevant, really," Hanley told reporters. "There's a lot of misinformation out there and conjecture and hidden meaning that just isn't there." Her reference to the crescent name shows that she was just thinking of the crescent shape. She was not even alert to the star. Murdoch obviously was, and he intentionally misled her. Dishonesty implies things to hide, so when we find more hidden things, like the orientation precisely towards Mecca, its damned clear that this is another a part of what Murdoch was hiding. Similarly with the separate memorial wall for the terrorists, similarly with the translucent blocks, similarly with the Mecca orientation through the dedicatory glass block.

You dirtbag Murdoch. You terrorist memorializing scum. Explain yourself. Is the orientation precisely towards Mecca a complete surprise to you? Then why did you lie about the Islamic star? And if you knew about all that, let’s talk about that upper section of the memorial wall, and the 44 translucent blocks on the flight path. Murdoch should be called before Congress. There is evidence that he tried to defraud the Park Foundation. This is a federal matter. Let’s get some answers. It is possible that Murdoch did not know the full extent of the Jihadist symbolism of the landscape architect's crescent design, and thought he was "only" defending the planting of an Islamic flag on the graves of our murdered heroes. If so, maybe he can help prove it.

ADDENDUM

A final technical point: Wretchard raises the question whether the north in the site plans for the Crescent of Embrace is true north. If it is magnetic north, it could be off 6 to 9 degrees from true north, making the orientation towards Mecca off by the same amount. I'm not sure this question really matters, since the first concern here is intent. If north on the site plan were to turn out to face magnetic north, that wouldn't change the clear implication that whoever came up with the plan thought he was using true north, and that all of these seeming orientations precisely towards Mecca are intended to be true orientations towards Mecca.

Nevertheless, in the name of thoroughness, I checked, and you can double check if you want to. Google Earth has good photographs of the whole neighborhood of the crash site, with true north at the top of the screen. Using the screenshot and arctangent technique, it is easy to find a couple of straight roads on the site plan and on the ground that can be compared. The two straight borders on the left side of the site plan for instance, forming a shallow v that comes in towards the crash site, coincide with two straight sections of road. The site plan is not oriented exactly to true north. It seems to be turned clockwise from true north about 3/4's of a degree. Better not tell Murdoch, or we know what his revision will be. Whoops. Ace and Allah beat him to it.

A mihrab?

Yoel notes in his comment that the crescent can be interpreted as a mihrab, a doorway shaped niche in the wall of a mosque, topped with a crescent and facing Mecca. It provides a symbolic door to Mecca that the believer symbolically passes into.

The mihrab at the Great Mosque in Cordoba.

On this interpretation, the Crescent of Embrace is not oriented away from Mecca, as many of us have been assuming, but rather is in the standard orientation of a mihrab, positioned so that a person facing Mecca can enter the crescent.

With the mihrab laid flat, the “outward embrace of Islam” as I have termed it becomes another possible interpretation. In the larger sense, this interpretation is ineluctable. The Muslim duty to Jihad has been historically interpreted as a duty to aggressive conquest.

Interestingly, Wikipedia lists the Arabic “to fight” as a possible etymology (not the most likely) of mihrab:

Others suggest that the root might be from Arabic حرب, "to fight" or "lead to war". As a noun it might be derived from "war", حرب and حربة , "lance". محراب is defined as a battlefield, in the sense jihād an-nafs (i.e. the fight against your own soul).

Wikipedia puts in the obligatory dhimmi interpretation that Jihad is a “fight against your own soul” rather than aggressive conquest of Dar al Harb. It is both, and so too the mihrab designed for the Flight 93 memorial should be interpretted as a locus both of inward Islamic piousness and of outward Islamic aggression. It is the former that has historically given rise to the latter, never more than on September 11th, 2001.

The above picture’s caption states: Salah, the canonical prayer, is performed five times each day…A Touareg in a desert Musalla (prayer-ground) in Algeria…faces Mecca to perform the salah (picture of from Glassé, Cyril. The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam. HarperCollins Paperback Edition, 1991, p. 391).

The picture shows an entry way into the Mosque and opposite the entry, a Mihrab.

Terms defined from Glasse's dictionary:

Mihrab: A niche in the wall of a mosque to indicate the qiblah, the direction of Mecca, towards which all Muslims turn in prayer.

Musalla: A place of prayer, and more specifically, a public praying field where, for the festival prayers of the 'Id al-fitr, 'Id al-adha, and prayers for rain, the whole population of a city may well meet for communal worship. In Iran the musalla is called an 'idqah. The original musalla was in Medina, at the site of the present Sabaq mosque.

Taureg (spelled “Touareg” in French). A Berber people of the Sahara…[snip]

Based on the data and graphics here, it seems the plan was for setting up an Al-Qaeda shrine like the one in Afghanistan (“Afghans seek cures at shrine for Al Qaeda: "The deaf, the mute, the lame all go to Martyrs cemetery to beseech the dead from a U.S. air raid, but they don't always hate Americans,” by Kim Barker, chicagotribune.com, 12 Jun 2005).

You are nuts my friend.Too bored to do something good for your country...so you dig in for hatred among us?Having being deeply involved with this process I must say you are either a fool or an asshole.Either way, you are pathetic.

You were deeply involved with the process? Are you saying that you are one of the designers, or that you are one of the jurors, or administrators?

If you were one of the designers, you have a lot of questions to answer. Are you saying that you were both a) someone who made some of the critical decisions that create define what I am calling the terrorist memorial wall (the exact location of the upper memorial wall, it's being bisected by the center line of the red maple crescent, the four extra translucent blocks in the flight path, etcetera) and b) that you had no awareness that the upper wall was centered on the red crescent bisector, the orientation of the crescent on Mecca, etcetera, then that is an interesting data point, and you should do you best to explain to people. But if you are claiming that there is nothing to explain, then you are not just an asshole, you are at some level knowingly complicit. Any person who had honestly not intended to place forty-four memorial blocks in the flight path, or not intended to have the upper wall integral with the crescent, or not intended to orient the crescent precisely on Mecca, would be aghast to discover that he had done these thing. You are not aghast. You either did it on purpose yourself, or you had at least some awareness that someone else was doing it. The fact that you are not aghast to find out what your group actually did, whether by mistake or on purpose, but instead are calling other people assholes for discovering it, tells me that there is something VERY damned wrong with you. If you want to explain different, we're all ears.

If, on the other hand, you were a juror, or an administrator, who had nothing to do with creating any of the Islamist structures, you too should be aghast at finding out that the crescent contains. That you are not tells me that you are not a person of good faith. You are saying that you would be content to plant an Islamic flag on the graves of our murdered heroes (perhaps you murdered kin), so long as you did it by mistake? You don't want to know about such a thing, and stop it? That's sick. That's like Cindy Sheehan calling the fascists who murdered her son "freedom fighters." It's a self-centered obliviousness beyond fathoming. But again, if you can explain yourself, lots of people would like to hear it.

If you really have something to say other than invent a conspiracy, I challenge you to go on the competition website and seek a proposal that is worthy. There are 1000 proposals there (if you think the 4 other finalists were also part of the conspiracy...)If you really care for those 40 Heroes, seek an inspiring design and call attention to it and cut all this bullshit.

What are you calling bullshit? Have you LOOKED at what I discovered about the Crescent of Embrace design? These are facts. The Crescent design DOES include an upper section of memorial wall, centered PRECISELY on the red maple crescent. There ARE forty four translucent blocks on the flight path, when translucent blocks are being used explicitly to memorialize dead individuals. If these and the other damning features of the Crescent memorial somehow happened by accident, it still calls for answers. But it is extraordinarily unlikely that such features could occur without the designers being aware. (It is pretty hard to say it isn't an Islamic crescent when it includes an almost exactly positioned Islamic star.) In this case it is even more important that questions be answered. There is an Islamo-fascist conspiracy that needs to be rooted out.

How anyone who claims to be deeply interested in honoring the heroes of Flight 93 can be uninterested in following overwhelming evidence of Islamist conspiracy is utterly beyond me. I want you to explain YOUR self. Just how the hell do you come to the view that evidence of Islamist intent not only does not merit investigation, but positively should not be investigated? What is your motto? "Let's not roll"? "Let's not look on Zacharias Massoui's computer"? "Let's not find out if the OU suicide bomber was driven by Islamic extremism?" "Let's stick our heads in the sand and pretend that Islamic extremism does not exist"? "Let's pretend that terrorism is driven by poverty, not religious ideology"?

The evidence is that somebody tried to stamp the flag of Islamo-fascist religious ideology on the graves of our Murdered countrymen. Just how the hell is that off limits for you to be interested in? Stop trying to tell ME what I should be interested in. You need to ask yourself what is going on in YOUR head that makes evidence of Islamist conspiracy something you think should NOT be investigated instead of something that SHOULD be investigated.

Back when this started up, I went and looked at the 1,000 entries at the Park Service to see what the original entry was entitled.

The "Crescent of Embrace" was originally "Flight 93 Memorial" and the term 'Crescent of Embrace' applied to an inset artists rendition.

iirc, the winning entry was in the latter 1/5th of the submissions. I flipped through a crapload of *really* *bad* designs to find the original entry. I don't care to repeat the task.

That said, you need to be careful about falling over into Wu-Tang Clan style symbology and numerology. I'm all for skewing the angle of the semicircle/ crescent so that it points towards, say, Tel Aviv.

But, if you find out that there are 72 trees in the semi-circle, don't be too quick to say that those represent the number of virgins.

Actually, on second thought, if there were 72 trees, that'd be pretty fucked up.

I really don't understand the Qibla orientation issue. Mecca is just south of the Tropic of Cancer. Pennsylvania is quite a bit north of the Tropic of cancer. The only way you can draw a line twixt PA and Mecca on a globe is to draw it southeast. Can you explain what I'm missing here?

About Me

Here is a short bio I sent to press people covering the Flight 93 memorial debacle. My training is as an economist. I was in the PhD program in economics at Stanford until my research led me more towards moral theory and constitutional law, at which point I dropped the program and started working on my own. I was writing a book on republicanism (the system of liberty under law) for World Ahead Publishing when I discovered that the Flight 93 memorial was going to be a terrorist memorial mosque. World Ahead agreed to first publish my book about this rehijacking of Flight 93 (Crescent of Betrayal, temporarily available for free download at CrescentOfBetrayal.com). This is not my first venture into journalism. Over the years I have been a writer, opinions editor, and advisor for Stanford’s conservative campus newspaper The Stanford Review, and am currently on the Review’s board of directors.